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Show HN: TinyPilot – Build a KVM over IP using a Raspberry Pi

mtlynch.io

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Re: Show HN: TinyPilot – Build a KVM over IP using a Raspberry Pi

#154

Post by FatalException »

wojciii wrote: post #17
mtlynch wrote: post #2

Author here. Happy to answer any questions or take any feedback about this post.

Cool project, but what about power management? What happens if the PC being controlled crashes and does not let you reboot it using keyboard shortcut? I'm might be damaged by testing and working with embedded development.

If the motherboard of the PC being controlled supports Wake-on-Lan that may be a viable option to send a packet from the local subnet to boot up the computer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN

Re: Show HN: TinyPilot – Build a KVM over IP using a Raspberry Pi

#155

Post by radiowave »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #126

I can't tell if the USB port that usually delivers power is the only one that supports "USB Device Mode" (USB OTG). Can someone confirm? If I could use any port, then there would be no need for powering the pi with a serial USB adapter.

From memory, this is correct. It's only the USB-C port that allows OTG operation. I remember a while back seeing someone selling a special splitter cable for the rpi4 which provided 2 separate USB connectors, one for powering the rpi and one for attaching the pi as a gadget to a USB host port. But I can't remember where I saw it, and haven't been able to turn up a link to it.

Re: Show HN: TinyPilot – Build a KVM over IP using a Raspberry Pi

#158

Post by davidzweig »

mtlynch wrote: post #45
wojciii wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool project, but what about power management? What happens if the PC being controlled crashes and does not let you reboot it using keyboard shortcut? I'm might be damaged by testing and working with embedded development.

Thanks for reading! > Cool project, but what about power management? What happens if the PC being controlled crashes and does not let you reboot it using keyboard shortcut? Yeah, that's one of the limitations. TinyPilot can't control power for the target computer. I don't know of any way to manage power without connecting the Pi to the target machine's motherboard, but that increases complexity significantly. I'm usi…

Wake-on-Lan can handle powering on. It should be possible to directly connect a RPi GPIO pin directly to the 0.1" headers on the motherboard.. the power and reset buttons are just closing a circuit to pull high/pull low an input pin. Use a 1k resistor between the Rpi and motherboard headers for protection.

Re: Show HN: TinyPilot – Build a KVM over IP using a Raspberry Pi

#159

Post by iron2disulfide »

jolmg wrote: post #150
iron2disulfide wrote: post #143

This is cool. Any chance this would scale for many machines? I have a ~15 machine lab with no KVM setup right now, and could really use something like this if it works for a large number of devices.

I'm not really into electronics, but I imagine it wouldn't be that difficult to control the switch of a cheap KVM-switch with the GPIO pins of the RPi. One might even control multiple KVM-switches and daisy-chain them.

Haha, I am kind of the opposite: I work on electronics, and am not much of a sys admin. One of the problems I've run into is that I haven't found a single switch solution with enough connections. I could build a multi-level multiplexer with many switches, but that's too much effort. If TinyPilot can support multiple KVM-over-IP connections, it would be a perfect fit for me.

Re: Show HN: TinyPilot – Build a KVM over IP using a Raspberry Pi

#160

Post by mtlynch »

dannyw wrote: post #91

Hey OP, I was reading your linked HomeLab article and you mentioned you'd rather have gotten a mobo with integrated GPUs next time. Actually, motherboards do not include integrated graphics, it's all in the CPU/APU. The mobo you linked would not provide graphics either. AMD unfortunately does not have a high end APU released to consumers right now (there are some 4000 series, but only to OEMs I believe). However, for…

Thanks for reading and for the note! I didn't realize that about display not being available on motherboards generally.

I just built a new homelab server and ended up buying a separate GPU again. My new mobo is the SuperMicro MBD-X10DAL[0], which has no onboard display.

[0] https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/X10DAL-i

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